Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.06.2003, Blaðsíða 89
THE S RECENSION
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like ‘þilik-’19 and oblique ‘reyckiv’20 which seem hard to parallel in
sources from the earliest part of the fourteenth century. A date between
c. 1330 and 1360 for the writing of AM 234 fol. is a plausible conclu-
sion, though comparison of characteristic features in, say, AM 468 4to
(1300-25), the Wolfenbiittel codex (1330-1370) and AM 350 fol.
(1363)21 would seem to put 234 closer to the first of these than to the
second pair. For a more precise conjecture see the next section.
3. Speculation on the origin of AM 234 fol. Given the probability
that AM 234 fol. was written towards or about 1350 and at Skálholt,
we cannot avoid reviewing circumstances which might explain why
work on it was never finished. Bad winters, earth tremors, a Hekla
eruption, serious dearth, death of farmstock, all occurred in that period
(IslAnn., 207-09, 213, 349-52, 353-54, s.a. 1336, 1339, 1341, 1348;
Sigurður Þórarinsson, Heklueldar, 52-54). Apart perhaps from produ-
cing a spate of cheaper vellum, they need not have directly affected
the cathedral scriptorium. It is probably more significant that three
bishops died in that time: a lavish undertaking like 234 was likely to
require the highest sanction and the investment of one diocesan would
in Codex Scardensis (SÁM 1), 1350-75. The exx. in Antonius saga and Thómas saga
erkibyskups in AM 234 fol. will thus be among the earliest to be found in Icelandic
literary texts.
19 Noreen, § 468.
20 Agnete Loth noted similar forms as features of the orthography of the lost vellum
she reconstructed from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century copies in Membrana regia
deperdita (1960); see there 22/24 n., 22/25 n., 22/26 n., 91/3, 203/13, 232/9; and her in-
troduction, lxxxvi-lxxxviii. She assigned the vellum to a date not later than c. 1350.
(The phrase ‘af sængar reyckiu’ occurs in the skipan of Bishop Jón Sigurðarson issued
in 1345 but since the text is preserved in AM 39 8vo, written c. 1470, the spelling is not
certainly original; DI II, 801.) Jón Þorkelsson, Supplement IV, cited various forms in
‘reyk(k)-’ from Óláfs saga helga printed in Fornmannasögur V, one of them from AM
61 fol. (dated by Ólafur Halldórsson to c. 1360; ÓTrEA III, xxxv-xxxvi), others from
Tómasskinna and Bergsbók. Exx. become more frequent in manuscripts of similar
date, from c. 1400 and the fifteenth century, e.g. AM 162 C fol., AM 561 4to, NKS
1824 b 4to, Stock. perg. 4:o nr 6, AM 557 4to; see respectively Opuscula V (1975), 33;
Gull-Þóris saga (ed. Kr. Kálund, 1898), 23; Vqlsunga saga (ed. M. Olsen, 1908), xxvii;
ívens saga (ed. F. W. Blaisdell, 1979), xxix-xxx and with ref. to Riddarasögur (ed. E.
Kölbing, 1872), 64, 67, 70; Hallfreðar saga (ed. Bjarni Einarsson, 1977), lviii; Eiríks
saga víðfQrla (ed. Helle Jensen, 1983), 82.
21 See Jón Helgason’s notes on these in MI 6, viii-xi, MI3, viii-ix, and Meddelelser fra
Norsk Forening for Sprogvidenskap, I (1926), 45-75.